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Joseph Wright of Derby(Derby 1734-1797)Portrait of Jane Darwin (1746-1835) and her son William Brown Darwin (1774-1841), seated, within a painted oval
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Poppy Harvey-Jones
Head of Sale

Lisa Greaves
Head of Department
Joseph Wright of Derby (Derby 1734-1797)
bears early inscription 'Jane Darwin (wife of William Alvey Darwin) aged 30./ 10th October 1776 and William Brown Darwin aged two/ years and an half, 12th August 1776./ Painted by Mr. Wright of Bath (formerly of Derby) in September 1776.' (on label on verso)
oil on canvas
76.3 x 63.6cm (30 1/16 x 25 1/16in).
Footnotes
Provenance
William Alvey Darwin (1726-83), Elston Hall, Nottinghamshire, and thence by descent
Literature
B. Nicolson, Joseph Wright of Derby, 1968, vol. I., pp. 13, 68, 195, no. 56, vol. II., p. 109., ill., pl. 177
This intimate portrait of Jane Darwin and her son is a mature work by the artist, painted during his two-year stay in Bath. Nicolson writes of the artist's portraits (op. cit., p. 13) that their success or failure depends above all on the amount of sympathy Wright was capable of extending to a sitter: "So long as he was a friend, or so long as his social or intellectual situation within a known framework could be grasped, Wright knew how to turn his body into art without losing track of the body's substance in the process... With Erasmus Darwin's brother and sister-in-law...he was on equal terms, of the same standing and culture, at ease with them in life and therefore in art."
Jane Darwin was the daughter of Joseph Brown of Balderton. As the inscription on the stretcher, which is near-contemporary, explains, she married William Alvey Darwin, the brother of the celebrated physician and natural philosopher, Erasmus Darwin, whose portrait by Wright is in the National Portrait Gallery in London. The dates on the the label on the stretcher where the days of the month are given are the birthdays of the sitters, except in the case of the boy, who was 2 1/2 on the 12 August.
